Be Cloning
Coming off a night of debauchery watching Rage DC over pots of Darjeeling. These things can be fun if the right kind of people attend and speak. Such as Forrest Gump. Who can forget his speech?
Some people were disinvited, then re-invited, then said 'oh fuck you' to the organisers. One of which is Scott Horton. Great job, Scott. Jimmy D had great words for you. Like if his house is burning and he calls the fire brigade but, when they arrive to save his house, he first demands to know what they think about child mutilation. Nothing works if Brandon 0 succeeds in burning this rock to a crisp. And don't kid yourselves: the Quartet of Idiots - Blinken, Nuland, Sullivan, Brandon - will do it if they want. They will. That's why it's so important to use every possible legal angle to out them and neutralise them. Starting now. By yesterday. And do not ever let up. Not ever.
Did you ever have the feeling you're sitting on something more valuable than you believed? An old girlfriend once admitted to this. But let's talk software. We keep working on this new app Be. We're into more easily creating templates from the user POV. Suddenly we realise, one evening, that we're already there, or closer to it, than we realised.
Particularly Be is about reshuffling code snippets, reorganising things, adding subordinate underbodies. Things get very complex at times. That's a feasible explanation for the time it can take to understand you've already accomplished what you hoped to accomplish real soon now.
First: download the new ACP. It's likely you'll be OK if you simply extract Be.app and move it into place. The framework has at any rate not been tampered with. Exit all instances of Be and then start the new copy.
Your first window should appear along the right side of your screen. (Yes we might make a video of this.*) So drag the window to a smaller size and move it to the lower left of your screen.
Now go into your Config menu and choose a different background colour. Such as blue.
Now go to your menu. To File-New. And hold down a Shift key as you select File-New. You should see an identical window (a 'clone') appear atop your first window. Check this by dragging the new window off to the lower right. You should now have two windows on screen.
Change the background colour of this new window to RED.
Now check how this works. Hold down a Shift and select File-New again. You should get a new window - a new 'clone' atop the second red window. Just move it above the first red window and then go back to your first blue window and click its title bar, then hold down a Shift again and select File-New. What did you get?
The secret is in the NeXT document controller. This is a class of code in the AppKit framework. You ask it which of your windows is 'current', ie which is 'key', the window that processes keyboard input, and it tells you.
Another part of the secret is in how this cloning works. As confused as things sometime get, we forgot that the config isn't read from disk but from a new secondary method which supplies data to an older top-level method - in memory. Meaning we need only get permission to read another instance's internal data and we can clone it. Which we've done.
Sounds rather complex for something that should be simple and straightforward. So true. And works like a breeze as if there's nothing at all complex about it. True again.
It takes a considerable effort to prepare and send out a new release. This is something we did over the weekend whilst we cast a glance now and then at Max and Jimmy in DC. (We saw too little of Liz Harper.) But we've since toyed with an enhancement/improvement. A safeguard which evidently isn't needed, as the runtime knows what to do with messages that have no recipient. Not satisfied with that solution, we added code to make sure no such messages are ever sent and, in the process, shaved off 24 bytes object. The size of the binary goes up, as before, by 32 bytes, but we're confident you're OK with that.
And so we take yet another breather from Be to let the dust settle, so we can again think about things with a bit of distance. But it's coming along well, is our estimate.
Cheers.
PS. Oops, just shaved off another 48 bytes by removing a redundant call. No point in doing things twice! Work work work, learn learn learn.
*We already have.
PPS. This might seem too abstract. Because it is. But those with triple-digit IQs will get it. Stickies? You go, Fanboy.
PPPS. We regularly get spam today. Despite one of the most intricate spam-evasion systems ever. Wanna know why? Google. They invite in the spammers en masse. It's only diagnostic messages from our IPP, but even so. Credit the green-haired woke freaks at Mountain View.
PPPPS. Try to catch the Peacemaker's speech today.